In any case, thanks for the suggestions on Montreal, and when next I’m there, I’ll act on them.  As it is, this week will be good for getting done all the things I was hoping to defer.

In other news, vests.  More vests.  Working pocket watch.  I need more nice shirts and ties; I love my black-on-black paisley tie dearly, but I need some variety.  Toronto should help for this.  Perhaps Montreal also has good vintage and used clothing stores?

No news, of course, on the real activity, which is grad school applications.  No news on that for a while, I suppose, which is the frustrating thing.

Also, I finished Dracula last night.  Quite good, though the entire role and character of Quincey Morris is underexplored and underexplained.  I would love to see some sort of speculative backstory for him, and why he’s so ready to accept the supernatural.  Worth also noting, the use of kukris in the book… is just cool.

Mostly, this past week has been a great trip back east, for Miranda’s graduation and seeing lots of friends in the Swarthmore area.  I also had some time in Rosemont, just being at home and enjoying the rain.  It was refreshing, and continues to make me want to be back east.

The Front Range has been having some extreme weather lately!  Flying back last night (yay 4 hour delayed flight…) we passed, for a good 10 or 15 minutes, a massive thunderhead with constant flashes of lightning in it.  It was terrifying, but truly beautiful.  It seemed otherworldly.  I learned later that there had been baseball-sized hail and tornadoes attached to that storm.

I would swear I had a point to this post when I started it, but it’s quite escaped me.  It might have to do with my still-pervasive desire to work for myself (or at least on a flexible, I-can-do-errands-in-mid-day schedule—I was so productive this past week, and I think it was mostly due to being able to work and be distracted in intense, alternating bursts.  Or perhaps it has to do with the various ways in which Burke’s latest resonates with me.

Oh yes!  Perhaps I meant to mention that I signed my first patent application today.  Exciting, but I have very mixed feelings about software patents.

I’ll be back east in less than a week, and that’s great.  I am also coming to some very clear ideas about what I want in life, and possibly how to achieve that.  Fortes fortuna adiuvat.

Speaking of which, I hope people have liked the pictures.  I have little more to say about the trip, despite having given a slideshow of it to my coworkers today.  It’s more a collection of little observations than a narrative.  However, one observation I’ve consistently forgotten to mention, and which I want to not forget, is the practice of the people who walk along the street selling things: they make a sort of kissing noise, or rattle a bunch of coins together in their hands, both in a distinctive fashion that’s hard to convey in words.  That’s half of it; the other thing they do is speak in a way that my inner phonetician would love to study, when hawking their wares—it’s with a constricted vocal tract, particularly the larynx, it sounds like, and at a lower pitch than normal speech.

For more, see my pictures.

Also, pictures forthcoming.